17-year-old runs up and shoves mama bear off a wall in her backyard to protect her dogs
Now here’s something you don’t see every day.
On Memorial Day, security footage caught an incredible encounter between a mama bear with her two cubs and a human mama bear with her four dogs. Don’t try this at home, kids.
Surveillance video shows Hailey Morinico, 17, intervening when a brown bear began swatting at the family’s four dogs from atop a brick wall in the yard of their Bradbury, California home.
Woman Pushes Bear Off Ledge to Save Her Dogs
The video, which was shared on TikTok by Hailey’s cousin (@bakedlikepie) with music for effect, has been viewed more than 47 million times on TikTok alone, in addition to going viral on Twitter.
My cousin Hailey yeeted a bear off her fence today and saved her dogs. How was your Memorial Day?! (WTF?!) #ohno #badass #brave #fight #bear
And if you want to see the raw footage without the hilarious “Oh No” music:
Reply to @cynthianatsalazar @tempurashrimp guess you a fighter and a flighter haha. Love you, you badass! #badass #cousinhailey
Hailey explained in a follow-up video that her family lives in a mountainous area and that bears wandering into their yard isn’t a rare occurrence, especially in the summer. However, the shoving of the bear off the wall was unusual.
At first, when Hailey heard the dogs barking, she thought they were barking at another dog or a squirrel or something. When she went out to the yard to tell them to stop, she saw the bear leaning over the wall trying to pick up the youngest of the family’s four dogs. Hailey said that her first instinct was to push the bear, which is exactly what she did.
It’s common knowledge that you don’t mess with a mama bear, and it’s unclear whether Hailey noticed the two cubs that were on the wall just before the confrontation. She is fortunate that she was not attacked by the bear herself. She said she didn’t have to push it very hard to make it lose its balance, perhaps because she took it by surprise while it was distracted by the dogs.
Hailey ended up with a sprained finger and a scraped knee, but she and the dogs are both fine following the incident.
“My daughter is a hero,” Hailey’s mother Citlally told McClatchy News. “My daughter literally made eye contact with death and pushed it off a ledge.”
This is one of those stories that no one would believe if it hadn’t been caught on film. “She ran up and shoved the mama bear right off the wall!” Yeah, right. Oh, you mean she literally did exactly that? Okay then.
Lessons learned: Humans, don’t mess with mama bears. And bears, don’t mess around with Hailey.
Source: Upworthy
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